E-cigarette retailers battle lawmakers on new tax

Wednesday

Jan 4, 2017 at 1:39 PM

The Associated Press

A group representing electronic cigarette retailers in Kansas is fighting to prevent the state from enforcing a new tax on vaping fluid.

A lobbyist for the Kansas Vapers Association argued during a legislative committee meeting Tuesday that the bill imposing the new tax on e-cigarettes was drafted poorly and made the original intent unclear, The Lawrence Journal-World (http://bit.ly/2j9oYPs ) reported.

The association told the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules and Regulations that legislators should revisit the law before allowing the Kansas Department of Revenue to enforce the tax.

"You never had a hearing, you didn’t follow your own rules, it was plugged into the (conference committee) bill at the end of the session, and that’s why you need to look at this before these rules become effective in March," lobbyist Tuck Duncan told the committee.

A provision to a tax bill passed in 2015 imposed a new tax on vaping fluid of 20 cents per milliliter of "consumable material."

Duncan told the panel that confusion lies with the phrase "consumable material." While the Department of Revenue interpreted the phrase to mean total fluid volume used in the e-cigarettes, the Kansas Vapers Association said it should apply solely to the volume of nicotine and not the water and other chemicals included in vaping fluid.

Duncan said the difference is significant because the tax on one e-cigarette would be roughly the same amount as the item’s price itself. But other tobacco-related taxes are based on total volume of the products instead of solely nicotine content.

In December, as the deadline to implement the tax was set to expire, the revenue department proposed temporary rules that were eventually rejected by the state board because the department did not meet the requirements necessary to justify making temporary rules. This means that although the tax officially went into effect Jan. 1, there are currently no permanent rules to be enforced on retailers.

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